Indeed, without some such prudence in the use of authority, I do not know, at least in the present time, how any power can long continue.
Edmund Burke
The Public Record
Edmund Burke was an Anglo-Irish writer, philosopher, and politician who is widely credited as the founder of the cultural and political philosophy of conservatism. Regarded as one of the most influential conservative thinkers and political writers of the 18th century, Burke spent the majority of his career in Great Britain and was elected as a member of Parliament (MP) from 1766 to 1794 in the House of Commons of Great Britain with the Whig Party. His writings played a significant role in influencing public views and opinions in both Great Britain and France following the French Revolution in 1789, and he remains a major figure in modern conservative circles.
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This sort of representation, my dear Sir, must wholly depend, not on the force with which it is upheld, but upon the prudence of those who have influence upon it.
If men have the real benefit of a sympathetic representation, none but those who are heated and intoxicated with theory will look for any other.
The opposition always connects the emancipation of the Catholics with these schemes of reformation: indeed, it makes the former only a member of the latter project.
They have been irritated by a treatment too much for the ordinary patience of mankind to bear into the adoption of schemes which, however argumentatively specious, would go practically to the inevitable ruin of the kingdom.
Nothing is more notorious than that I have the misfortune of thinking that no one capital measure relative to political arrangements, and still less that a new military plan for the defence of either kingdom in this arduous war, has been…
The judgment of the eminent and able persons who conduct public affairs is undoubtedly superior to mine; but self-partiality induces almost every man to defer something to his own.
I cannot bear to think on the causes by which this great plan of policy, so manifestly beneficial to both kingdoms, has been defeated.
If I had needed any incentives to do my best for freeing the body of my country from the grievances under which they labor, this alone would certainly call forth all my endeavors.
The miserable natives of Ireland, who ninety-nine in an hundred are tormented with quite other cares, and are bowed down to labor for the bread of the hour, are not, as gentlemen pretend, plodding with antiquaries for titles of centuries…
Least of all would I fix the transitory spirit of civil fury by perpetuating and methodizing it in tyrannic government.
I shall never praise confiscations or counter-confiscations as long as I live.
For, if the Irish resisted King William, they resisted him on the very same principle that the English and Scotch resisted King James.
If the principle of the English and Scottish resistance at the Revolution is to be justified, (as sure I am it is,) the submission of Ireland must be somewhat extenuated.
It ought to lesson us into an abhorrence of the abuse of our own power in our own day, when we hate its excesses so much in other persons and in other times.
History records many things which ought to make us hate evil actions; but neither history, nor morals, nor policy can teach us to punish innocent men on that account.
Admitting, then, the enormity of this unnatural rebellion in favor of the independence of Ireland, will it follow that it must be avenged forever?
They call for no man's estate; they desire not to be dispossessed of their own.
The people desire the privileges inseparably annexed, since Magna Charta, to the freehold which they have by descent or obtain as the fruits of their industry.
It is bounty, it is charity,--wise bounty, and politic charity; but no man can claim it as a right.
Is this, or anything like this, asked in favor of any human creature in Ireland?
Trusting wholly in their strength and power, (and upon this they reckon, as always ready to strike wherever they wish to direct the storm,) they abandon all pretext of the general good of the community.
So much is this the design, that the violent partisans of this scheme fairly take up all the maxims and arguments, as well as the practices, by which tyranny has fortified itself at all times.
But the conscience of a man left, and a tenderness for it hypocritically pretended, is to make it a trap to catch his liberty.
If the constitutional liberty of the subject were not the thing aimed at, the direct reverse course would be taken.
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